Welcome back for the 24th Annual Sonic Hacking Contest!

If you caught our original announcement, you’ll know this year brings many, MANY substantial changes to the contest rules, format, and media coverage. If you missed it, here’s a brief summary and links to the most important pieces of information.

We’ve revised our Quality Control to better ensure submissions meet or exceed a consistent standard of quality, addressing many of the concerns raised about the dip in quality during last year’s event. We have made other changes to the Submission Guidelines to strictly limit AI-usage in submissions and prohibit use of generative assets, as well as relax our off-site update policy. You can read more on the Quality Control Guidelines and Rules and Submission Guidelines pages.

We have heavily revised the Contest’s format this year to more broadly recognize the achievements found in all entries. These changes include:

• The Judged/Unjudged entry split has been made internal-only so that all entries are given equal exposure.
• All entries are now eligible to receive Community trophies.
• Trophies have been heavily consolidated, with all but the podium trophies being made Community-only.
• The voting system for trophies is now ranked-choice.
• Judges now give out a brand new award type to Judged entries called Medals, which are awarded based on an approval vote system.
• Honorable mentions have been expanded and Judges can now nominate and vote to award any entry to receive one for achievements that fall outside of Trophy or Medal criteria.

This is just a broad overview, so for more detailed information on the award roster and voting system changes, check out the Categories, Voting, and Awards page.

Starting this year, we have ditched the official Media Panel schedule to allow Media Panelists to stream at their leisure during the event. Additionally, we have introduced an official stream tag #SHC2026Live for guest streamers that wish to provide their own live coverage of the event. We will be promoting and featuring streams from both Media Panelists and guest streamers throughout the event to ensure attendees and entrants know where to tune in.

That basically summarizes the bulk of the big changes this year! There have been a couple staffing changes, and already a couple technical difficulties that forced us to move some things around, so for the latest updates, be sure to check the news feed.

Ready? Set! PROCRASTINATE!